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IGN Review of Petz: Sports
With the overwhelming success of the brand on its portable DS system, you would have thought that Nintendo would have brought its Nintendogs virtual pet experience home to the Wii by the now. But it hasn't, which has made the sim pet care genre on the Wii a pretty much up-for-grabs piece of real estate for other companies to try to cash in on -- and a few have, chief among them Ubisoft. The French publisher's Petz brand has been making the jump to Wii in full force in recent months, and one of the latest efforts is Petz Sports.
Perhaps intended to be seen as a joining of the Petz brand and the appeal of Wii Sports, Petz Sports offers a fairly traditional virtual pet experience -- but then backs up that experience with some added athletic events starring your digital dogs. The concept works well enough. The problem, though, is that it isn't taken nearly far enough in execution.
Because there's only a handful of activities, and none of them are really the "sports" you'd expect. The game's name implies them, but you won't get anything like doggy tennis, or bowling, or even golf. What you do get is fetch. And jumping rope. And running, as your playful puppy goes head-to-head against other dashing dogs in a race to the finish line. All in very limited renditions, too.
Now, for the running sequences, sometimes there are hurdles thrown in. And sometimes you have to call your dog's attention back to the race when it gets distracted, by inputting an on-screen button sequence in the right order, or run around cones or some other tricky thing. But slight variations on the theme aside, it's all straight-up running. Which is made all the worse by the fact that the straight-up running controls are the most basic up-and-down Wii Remote waggle motions.
You'll be flailing your arm back and forth as fast as you can, spurring your dog on to cross the finish line first -- and, if it does, you'll simply earn the right to run the next race, doing the very same thing over again. It's repetitive and boring, and it's going to make your arm feel sore.
Outside of the racing contests, there are similarly simple mini-games for playing fetch (which involves pitching a ball at a moving target on screen) and jumping rope (which is a bit like Dance Dance Revolution, with icons streaming vertically down the screen). Dancing, as it turns out, is another different game.
But that's where the "sports" end, and none of them end up offering any hint of the lasting appeal that makes design ideas like this worthwhile in the long run -- there are people still playing Wii Sports Tennis and Bowling regularly to this day, thanks to the timelessness of their designs. But none of Petz Sports' sports come close to that.
Beyond the lackluster athletics, then, you've just got your standard set of virtual pet caregiving activities to play around with back in your virtual bedroom. You can pet your puppy to increase its love for you. You can dress it up in a variety of comical outfits. You can teach it new tricks, by playing a short mini-game in which you guide a cursor shaped like a doggy treat through a path on the screen by pointing and dragging it with the Wii Remote. But that's pretty much it. You've seen all there is to see after just a short while with the game.
The game does have unlockable content, but it's all more of the same -- extra outfits for the dress-up mode, or the right to adopt multiple different puppies. There's little new gameplay to discover, and that lack is what makes Petz Sports run out of appeal quickly. You don't even have some basic virtual pet genre staples like feeding the dog and washing its fur here. It's too limited a design.
©2009-01-06, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Perhaps intended to be seen as a joining of the Petz brand and the appeal of Wii Sports, Petz Sports offers a fairly traditional virtual pet experience -- but then backs up that experience with some added athletic events starring your digital dogs. The concept works well enough. The problem, though, is that it isn't taken nearly far enough in execution.
Because there's only a handful of activities, and none of them are really the "sports" you'd expect. The game's name implies them, but you won't get anything like doggy tennis, or bowling, or even golf. What you do get is fetch. And jumping rope. And running, as your playful puppy goes head-to-head against other dashing dogs in a race to the finish line. All in very limited renditions, too.
Now, for the running sequences, sometimes there are hurdles thrown in. And sometimes you have to call your dog's attention back to the race when it gets distracted, by inputting an on-screen button sequence in the right order, or run around cones or some other tricky thing. But slight variations on the theme aside, it's all straight-up running. Which is made all the worse by the fact that the straight-up running controls are the most basic up-and-down Wii Remote waggle motions.
You'll be flailing your arm back and forth as fast as you can, spurring your dog on to cross the finish line first -- and, if it does, you'll simply earn the right to run the next race, doing the very same thing over again. It's repetitive and boring, and it's going to make your arm feel sore.
Outside of the racing contests, there are similarly simple mini-games for playing fetch (which involves pitching a ball at a moving target on screen) and jumping rope (which is a bit like Dance Dance Revolution, with icons streaming vertically down the screen). Dancing, as it turns out, is another different game.
But that's where the "sports" end, and none of them end up offering any hint of the lasting appeal that makes design ideas like this worthwhile in the long run -- there are people still playing Wii Sports Tennis and Bowling regularly to this day, thanks to the timelessness of their designs. But none of Petz Sports' sports come close to that.
Beyond the lackluster athletics, then, you've just got your standard set of virtual pet caregiving activities to play around with back in your virtual bedroom. You can pet your puppy to increase its love for you. You can dress it up in a variety of comical outfits. You can teach it new tricks, by playing a short mini-game in which you guide a cursor shaped like a doggy treat through a path on the screen by pointing and dragging it with the Wii Remote. But that's pretty much it. You've seen all there is to see after just a short while with the game.
The game does have unlockable content, but it's all more of the same -- extra outfits for the dress-up mode, or the right to adopt multiple different puppies. There's little new gameplay to discover, and that lack is what makes Petz Sports run out of appeal quickly. You don't even have some basic virtual pet genre staples like feeding the dog and washing its fur here. It's too limited a design.
©2009-01-06, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved